Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Yes, tell us a little bit about Dreamland, your own recent book which features a near-future dystopia. It took Rosa 7 years to write this novel. I’m guessing a lot of the time was spent polishing the similes, which are laid out aplenty and are very good. It’s the first novel I read where COVID-19 is mentioned – it must have been worked into the plot towards the end, just before the final proofs were signed off. Here are some of the similes I really liked: Dreamland – which shares its name with the long-established amusement park on Margate seafront – is a novel seven years in the making, its gestation predating the division caused by the build up to and fallout from Brexit. The B-word doesn’t appear in the book but the related and growing divides in our society are portrayed and expanded in unflinching terms. A combination of both – we are simultaneously experiencing a housing crisis and a climate crisis. In this country, they haven’t come close to peaking – or clashing together – in full force yet, but they will, and it will be devastating.
Rosa Rankin-Gee
On the wires between his building and the one across the street, there were sparrows perched, evenly spaced, like fairy lights.” If you have been paying attention to the world of late, wrapped up rather despairingly as it is in pandemic, war, climate change and creeping intolerance and extremism, it will not surprise you that hope is in short supply for many people. After the actual text (certainly in the ARC), Rankin-Gee has also included a list of resources and information about the very real versions of the events of the books. She highlights several of the existing government programmes designed to regenerate towns and to displace those from the cities. Nothing in Dreamland is as farfetched as we’d like it to be. I have family in Kent and live in Norfolk. I have seen coastal erosion and its effects first-hand, so seeing the potential impact of the climate change for these areas long-term does have a scary edge to it.
Sign up to our newsletter
In their new home, they find space and wide skies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they've lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD's business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before - well-spoken and wearing sunscreen - something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous. As I was saying before, I think the best dystopias are really well-judged games of distraction. You’re not always told: this is what’s happening. It’s just happening around you. These two novels are really superb examples of something simultaneously calibrated to the YA audience, and the adult audience. And in the pared-down nature of the story—of it being one girl against these huge world events—something very illuminating and compelling happens. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my book too: there’s a 16-year-old narrator and it’s about her infinitely personal route through huge political and climatic events. As I was saying before, dialogue is really hard to do. And this has perhaps sixty different voices. It’s polyphonic. Max Brooks is able to inhabit all these different characters. It’s an astounding piece of work. I feel quite evangelical about it. In Chance, the novel’s protagonist, Rankin-Gee has created one of those characters that stays with the reader long after finishing the book. Part Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, part Turtle from Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling, Chance is named with irony as hers is a life all-but devoid of opportunity.
Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Waterstones Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Waterstones
Best friends Agnes and Bea have just finished secretarial college and, longing for excitement, they tell their parents they’re going travelling round Europe but move into a chaotic house-share in Hampstead and try to lose their virginity. The region has been frequently ill-served by its politicians too. In the early 1980s a Tory councillor got six years for fraud and forgery. Jonathan Aitken was the MP for South Thanet when he was convicted and imprisoned for perjury. A decade ago a former Conservative leader of the council went to prison for property-related misdemeanours carried out during his time in office. A love story. A tragedy. A warning. The story of one girl and an entire society. At the same time, terrifying and hopeful. Dreamland takes the familiar and twists it a couple of degrees to show a disturbing and disturbingly credible picture of our possible future. What will happen if we keep ignoring climate change, allow inequalities to widen, allow eugenics to creep into the mainstream and build walls?Exactly. Except it had, like, a single pair of underwear and a can of beans in it. But there was this feeling that something might happen, and you need to be ready. I talked about that before—the teetering feeling of fear and hope and agency… catnip to a young teenager. Yes, you’ll be interrupting each other, responding to previous points, or firing off messages part-written, in chunks, to avoid long gaps of ‘silence’. Then, despite being among most vulnerable regions to the consequences of leaving the European Union, Thanet voted in favour of Brexit by a majority of almost two to one.
Mirror Book Club: The Power Of Geography a fascinating look Mirror Book Club: The Power Of Geography a fascinating look
This subplot underpins a wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace and clarity. The narration is extraordinarily well done. Many post-apocalyptic books have a spareness and sparseness that can sometimes feel affected. This feels incredibly naturalistic, and yet manages to be very lyrical. One review I read talked about it having a haiku-like quality. It has these clipped sentences, in a way that feels hyper-realistic to how minds think. It’s effortlessly beautiful while being violent and harrowing. That book is very different in tone, but it’s similar in its brilliance, and that you have a female narrator in her teens. In How I Live Now, the narrator’s mum has died and her dad has sent her to England to stay with her cousins who are wild marauders who live in a large country house. War breaks out while she’s there. The interesting thing in this novel is that—unlike Ann in Z is for Zachariah who is quite self-contained and quite spartan throughout—the How I Live Now narrator has very teenage preoccupations and energy and spunk, and the war is happening at great remove from them until it suddenly intervenes. My only issue with this book was the ending point. Rankin-Gee weaves some beautiful writing into a story that is often harsh and aggressive, and although I can understand the open-ended imagination prompting ending, I am so invested in these characters that it’s a little disappointing to not know a little more. However, I still gave Dreamland 5 stars because the rest of the book deserves it, and I can understand why the ending could be like it was. However, if you’d like to tell me what happens with a certain child, Rosa, please do!This point about hope is interesting. I think sometimes that’s these appeal of these near-future dystopias. Something like: after the worst is over, comes the recovery. Would you agree with that? The band’s compelling story is told by a multitude of voices interviewed by journalist S Sunny Shelton. Her father Jimmy was a drummer for the band and murdered at the showcase – and she is determined to find out exactly happened. I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like fern unfolding in a nature documentary.” Chance falls in love with Francesca, a wealthy Londoner who is working with one of those aid charities. While Chance dreams of forging a life together, Francesca is evasive. Chance is a vividly drawn character. We see that she has lived a brutal life and that her future holds little promise. We can understand why she wants to be with Francesca, and grab a part of her world, however fleeting. But their on-off relationship may pall with some readers after a while. Chance changed as the novel did, but there were always lines or moments or bits of dialogue where I’d think ‘that’s her’, and that allowed me to find her again when at first I lost her. I love Chance.
Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee review – first love and rising
When her emotionally distant husband refuses point blank, Florence sets off on a solo road trip instead. There’s even a tubthumping fringe politician who “says it like it is” and keeps saying it like it is until he’s manoeuvred himself into power, ready to turn on the people he’d hoodwinked to get him there.He sat with me for an hour. Fed me chocolate. Kept saying I was an idiot. I kept saying I was an idiot too, and that he was. I don’t know why we said that to each other so much all through our lives. Maybe because we both always knew we weren’t. Somehow he managed to make me laugh too. We both laughed. I can’t remember what about. Fear, euphoria — they’re weirdly close together sometimes.” (P. 298)
Great Deal 
New Comment